Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Academic "red shirting" - are they really gifted?

I found it very interesting that your school uses only achievement testing as a means for giftedness. I think that is very unfair. My school uses acievement testing to place the "high achieving kids" and full scale IQ to place the gifted. Thanks for reminding me to be thankful.

stronglight
can you give me an idea of a puzzle book like that. We don't have any.

Also i really appreciated your story and saw a lot of "me" in it. I went to school smelling like cigarette smoke, wasn't very pretty mostly because my hair was cut close to my head to be "easier" on my mother, did my homework in a hovel of a big mess with fights raging, etc. But somehow i got through it and will never forget when they called my name in fifth grade to participate in a gifted program. I remember seeing my fifth grade teacher peering at the list and then calling my name and was just shocked. I knew just what it wss all about, though i was only a little better than average with achievement at that point. My parents were so determined to get me out of the house that they started me in kindergarden early so i was the youngest by far in my grade.. We were in the middle of moving so they let me start school for one day in the district that had a later cutoff, then moved me to the new district which had to allow it since i had started already..So it must have been an aptitude test since i was so young don't think it could have been achivement test. . And with some bumps in the road i did rise above it all (though my family thinks I'm "uppity").. I dont' remember feeling that the other kids were in there were not deserving, but looking back they were all the rich , right-side-of-the-tracks types. And at least one was almost 2 years older due to red-shirting.

irene

Inspiring post, stronglight. Thank you.

Welcome!! Good post!!

Encyclopedias are to GT kids what Teddy Bears are to others!

Your story parallels mine (and many on this forum) in key respects. School was agony for me as well.

My husband, who is in his late 50's, did well on tests even though he never studied in high school. He didn't have time to study because he was working so he could have enough to eat. He was one of eight kids in the family who had to take care of themselves after their mother died. Hid dad wasn't around much. There was no one to encourage him to do well in school, not even his teachers, because he was from the wrong side of the tracks. Nobody was making sure he wore clean clothes to school or cared if he had clothes that fit or if he had enough to eat or was getting the proper nutrition.

He made it on his own because he had that innate ability to learn quickly, had good people skills, and his survival instincts were good. He made high scores on tests in the military even though he hadn't had the best education, high enough that they put him in the Army Security Agency, which Wikipedia says was comprised primarily of soldiers with the very highest scores on army intelligence tests.

My husband told me a few days ago that he never felt like he needed to have everything planned out like I do so he doesn't have anxiety over the possibility of things going wrong and needing to have a contingency plan in place. He always knew he could "muddle through" whatever he needed to get through. I can see that there were some good things that came from his difficult childhood.

But I still worry about my twice exceptional son. I think it is harder for a twice exceptional child to muddle through, especially when it seems like so many people don't understand that a child can be gifted and also have a disability.

I loved school when I was a child. Not because I learned new stuff, academics were usually boring. I loved the daily chllenge of debating with my teachers and finding ways to prove the wrong answers right.
My teachers either loved or hated me there was no in between.

We were also at the bottom of the financial scale.
~NE one remember having to turn in the pink lunch tickets instead of the green ones everyone else had.
I begged my parents every day to pack my lunch. I had to refuse to eat school lunches for almost week before they finally gave in.
If you did not eat your lunch at our school you had to sit in the lunch room until you decided to eat. I sat in the lunchroom all day, for 4 days in a row and refused to eat one bite. My parents finally got tired of the phone calls! hehe
Be glad you did'nt have to raise me, I was only in 1st grade at the time.

I am glad our family struggled. Hurdles build character. I was a prideful manipulative child and would have become spoiled brat if my parents would have had money. Instead I had to use patience and hard work to get what I wanted.
Not having it all also taught me to appreciate nonmaterial things, which is a rare ability these days.

I had never heard of nor even considered academic red shirting. This is such a new topic to me. I am not aware of anyone having done this nor if this is even possible in our district. All of the children in my son's first grade class were the "right" age for first grade.

Interesting thread. My son's elementary school has a high number of students who have scored very well. It was enough to be considered into the gifted program, however, it was only one componet of a matrix.

For the most part, my son's 2E issues didn't persuade me to have him participate in the GT program until middle school. I thought at the time, he needed to learn to manage his time and study skills well before we attacked something more challenging (little did I suspect ADHD problems)

Anyway, I think my son's elementary school also considers only allowing less than 10% to be serviced with a pull out program because, the students will get advance work within the regular classrom

I find this topic kind of interesting that many people 1) get accused of hothousing and 2) care that people think that they do it. Let me preface I've never been accused of it, but I kind of wish I had been challenged. I feel like I'm missing out (just kidding of course).

I never, ever went about teaching my kids to read. My MIL did try with my eldest though when she was about 4 and I was embarrassed that she was sitting DD on her lap trying to point words out in books to have DD parrot them back. I, on the other hand, read and sang a lot of songs to her. She didn't read to me until K - but quickly progressed (basically, once I pronounced a tricky word, she subsequently remembered it and was progressing fast through the grade levels. She moved from not reading to reading 7th grade material in 2 years). She also draws parallels between books or other information she takes in. It's really cool to watch those connections being made.

My second dd self-taught. Truly. One day she couldn't read and the next day she's reading to me Green Eggs and Ham (though she spent an inordinate amount of time making up her own stories based on the pictures in the book). She was 4.5 at the time. She's not quite 6 (September birthday) and will be going into K and finished her first chapter book (dinosaurs before dark). She's not a voracious reader, but she'll read at least one book or chapter a day (well, I must amend she reads to herself on the toilet a lot - will take a stack of books in there, but as far as reading a lot out loud to me, not so much). But she is still becoming quite fluent for not having to work hard at it. She'll take a stab at quite complicated vocabulary words and often gets them correctly the first time around. Other times of course she needs a hand.

Had it not been for her selective mutism, I would have probably been alright to push for early entrance. But that would not have helped her anxiety. She simply wasn't ready. But I always viewed this holding back a year as a negative, not a positive. I don't know. Maybe because it to me seems that way because it could be interpreted as being "held back" because you repeated kindy (even thought that's not the case). I didn't realize until recently that this was seen as a "good thing" for any kids unless they weren't academically ready.

But aside from that, I do show my kids lots of things. I don't force anything into them, but whereas many parents might do crafts for their kids, we study nature and we do science experiments and I provide lots of math materials and math games to play with. The older ones occasionally teach the youngest one her letters (they pretend play "school" with her).

My dd5 comes to me with her dry erase board and says, "mom, lets do math". So, do I tell her "no"? Of course not. So I draw her picture with some addition problems (three flowers + four flowers = ?) and she fills in the number sentence. Then she says to me, "okay mom, it's your turn to answer". And she'll laugh as she draws me 7 flowers plus 12 flowers and thinks she can stump me. Not that she's far ahead in math, because right now she isn't.

In fact, she tells me she's worried that she doesn't "know math", and seems to not believe me much when I tell her that the teacher will teach her what she doesn't know. My guess is though she'll pick up the patterns because she's great at seeing where patterns exist. She just doesn't know that's what she does and that will work out to her advantage. I just have this feeling that, like with reading, she'll just "get it" and will adapt rather quickly.

My oldest 7 comes to me in first grade and says "mom, can you teach me multiplication?" because she hears about it from her teacher. Do I say "no"? Of course not. I go buy a pack of flashcards and a workbook - not to quiz her on them, but so I can show her with manipulatives using the cards (because I don't like my handwriting). So, I pick an "easy" math problem, like 3*3 and set it up three rows of three objects. I show her that 3*3 is 3+3+3 which is also known as 3 groups of 3 items. After doing some other problems, she's realizing that this is where all the skip counting comes in handy (2,4,6,8 and 5, 10, 15, 20, and so on). Now she gets there was a reason for that.

I think kids quite plainly know what they want to know and to not honor what they want to know is the quickest way to kill their desire for learning new material.